IACR Crypto 2002 Preface

Crypto 2002, the 22nd Annual Crypto Conference, was sponsored by
IACR, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, in
cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on
Security and Privacy and the Computer Science Department of the
University of California at Santa Barbara. It is published as
Volume 2442 of the Lecture Notes In Computer Science (LNCS) of
Springer Verlag. Note that 2002, 22 and 2442 are all palindromes...
(Don't nod!)

The conference received 175 submissions, of which 40 were accepted;
two submissions were merged into a single paper, yielding the total
of 39 papers accepted for presentation in the technical program of
the conference. In this proceedings volume you will find the
revised versions of the 39 papers that were presented at the
conference. The submissions represent the current state of work in
the cryptographic community world-wide, covering all areas of
cryptologic research. In fact, many high-quality works (that surely
will be published elsewhere) could not be accepted. This is due to
the competitive nature of the conference and the challenging task of
selecting a program. I wish to thank the authors of all submitted
papers. Indeed, it is the authors of all papers who have made this
conference possible, regardless of whether or not their papers were
accepted.

The conference program was also immensely benefited by two plenary
talks. The first invited talk was by Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, who spoke
on "New Directions in Quantum Cryptographic Protocols." In the
second talk, David Chaum gave the 2002 IACR Distinguished Lecture,
entitled "Privacy Technology: A Survey of Security without
Identification."

My deepest thanks go to the program committee members. Serving on a
program committee seems, at times, like a thankless job. When a
paper is accepted certain people may believe it is due to the
paper's intrinsic quality, whereas when a paper is rejected it is
attributed to the misjudgment of committee members. The demanding
nature of the task of careful evaluation and selection is, at times,
easily forgotten. In reality, the reviewing process for this
conference was a huge challenge that demanded from committee members
top-level scientific capabilities, combined with a lot of
time-consuming hard work. Each paper was reviewed by at least three
members, and some papers (including those submitted by committee
members) were reviewed by as many as six reviewers. The process
followed the review directives of IACR.
We reached our decisions via electronic discussions and in a meeting
of the program committee; this was a tough job whose successful
completion should be credited to each and every committee member.
We were assisted by the program committee's advisory members, as
well as by an army of external reviewers whose expertise and help is
highly appreciated. Their names are given in a separate list. (I
apologize for any possible omission.)

The conference was run by Rebecca Wright, who served as the general
chair. I thank her for all her work, and in particular for her
continuous assistance to the program committee and the program
chair. Some of the committee members as well as other members of
the community served as session chairs during the conference, and I
thank them for their help in running the program. The conference
program also included the traditional Rump Session, chaired by
Stuart Haber, featuring short informal talks on recently completed
research and work in progress.

The committee task was an international effort (as befits the IACR,
where the "I" stands for "International"). We had members from
all over the world, a chair in the USA, a program committee meeting
in the Netherlands and a web server in Belgium. We utilized
Internet technology as much as we could. This was possible due to
efforts by a number of individuals. I thank Berry Schoenmakers for
making all the necessary local arrangements for the Program
Committee meeting in Amsterdam (just before Eurocrypt 2002). I
thank Bart Preneel, and his great team at K.U. Leuven, Thomas Herlea
and Wim Moreau, who administered the submission and web-review
software. Their support has been instrumental. I thank my
Ph.D. student Aggelos Kiayias, who served as a technical assistant
to the chairs and helped me with the various technical and
technological aspects of running the committee and preparing the
conference proceedings. Further thanks are due to Bart Preneel, Wim
Moreau and Joris Claessens for authoring the web-review software
that was used in the refereeing process, and to Chanathip
Namprempre, Sam Rebelsky and the SIGACT's Electronic Publishing
Board, for authoring the software for the electronic submissions.
Thanks are also due to the publisher, Springer Verlag.

To summarize, I benefited greatly from the pleasant and effective
working relationships that I enjoyed with the many individuals I had
to collaborate with in order to make the program possible, and it
was a real learning experience. Indeed, the making of a program for
a conference such as Crypto 2002 is an effort that requires a lot of
work from a lot of individuals. Fortunately, the IACR and the
cryptographic community at large form the active, strong, vibrant
and relevant community that supports our successful conferences.
Long live Crypto!